The rivalry for trade in tea and textiles between the English and Dutch East India companies is very much a global history. This trade is strongly connected to emblematic events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution.

Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how objects such as mugs and handkerchiefs were entangled with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small things, from tiny books to ceramic trinkets and toothpick cases, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users while at the same time signalling the limits of the body's adeptness or the hand's dexterity. Simultaneously, the volume explores the striking mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry political, philosophical, and cultural concepts into circumscribed spaces. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, such small things as tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global goods.

This book links the trade of the Danish and Swedish East India companies to the British taste for tea, a Scandinavian craving for colourful Chinese silk textiles, import substitutions schemes and natural history in the eighteenth century. It is a global history exploring the exchange of silver for goods in Canton. It is also a European history studying the wholesale market for Asian goods in Gothenburg and Copenhagen, the formation of taste and the impact of fashion in the blending of tea and the assortments of colours on wrought silk destined for markets across Europe. Linking material history to political economy and the histories of science, this book ends on the threshold of the nineteenth century, the rise of the second British Empire in Asia, and the creation of synthetic dyes in Europe.

Revised, updated and expanded, this second edition analyzes the structures and practices of European economies within a global context.

A bold new interpretation of 'consumer revolution' in 18th-century Europe, examining globalization and the politics of consumption in the age of Revolution.

A reassessment of the Anglo-Dutch wars of the second half of the seventeenth century, demonstrating that the conflict was primarily about trade.

This book revisits the historically different paths to economic development that Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States followed at different time periods since the early modern period. Addressing the questions of how economic growth came about in these four countries and why sustained economic growth was achieved only by the two latter economic powers - Great Britain and the United States, it clearly highlights the long-term economic impact of the individual economic systems each country had developed. This discussion draws on two important variables in economic systems: whether its primary activity is agriculture, commerce, or manufacturing, and whether its productive system expands or simply reproduces. From this interpretive framework, the book suggests that the existing literature has not yet paid sufficient attention to the enduring impact on a nation’s long-term economic performance of their differing economic systems - simple agricultural reproduction system (Spain), expansive commercial reinvestment system (the Netherlands), and expansive industrial reproduction system (Great Britain and the United States). The book also demonstrates why sustained economic growth was viable only within an expansive industrial reproduction system, and what conditions Great Britain and the United States had to fulfill to create such an economic system in their specific historical contexts. It concludes by reflecting on the policy implications of the findings on current discussions concerning economic development within the global economy.

In Globalization and the Colonial Origins of the Great Divergence Pim de Zwart examines the Dutch East India Company’s intercontinental trade and its effects on living standards in various regions on the edges of the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contrary to conventional views, De Zwart finds significant evidence of the integration of global commodity markets, an important dimension of globalization, before the 1800s. The effects of this globalization, and the associated colonialism, were diverse and could vary between and within regions. As globalization and colonialism affected patterns of economic development across the globe they played a part in the rise of global economic inequality, known as the ‘Great Divergence’, in the early modern period.

In this fully updated, second edition of Crossroads, Jim Baker adds two new chapters that bring Malaysia and Singapore into the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. The original text (which traces the complex currents of history and politics of Malaysia and Singapore—neighbours with a common past) is also revised to re-evaluate events in the context of an expanded history. “Jim Baker’s Crossroads is bound to raise more than a few eyebrows in more than a few quarters. His book presents a side of history not many may be aware of or even want to know … it is as thought-provoking as it is enlightening.” — The Sun (on the first edition). “Baker’s thrilling book profits from his refusal to separate Singapore’s history from Malaysia’s. What we get is a broad story filled with surprising details drawn from his own experiences and from other scholarly works, and told in an easy and captivating style.” — Dr Ooi Kee Beng, Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

This volume explores commercial relations between the United States and China from the eighteenth century until 1949, fleshing out with facts the romantic and shadowy image of "the China trade." These nine chapters by specialists in the field have developed from papers they presented at a conference supported by the national Committee on American-East Asian Relations. The work begins with an Introduction by John K. Fairbank, then moves on to analysis of the old China trade up to the American Civil War, centering on traditional Chinese exports of tea and silk. A second section deals with American imports into China--cotton textiles and textile-related goods, cigarettes, kerosene. Finally, the impact of the trade on both countries is assessed and the operations of American-owned and multinational companies in China are examined. For both the United States and China, the economic importance of the trade proves to have been less than the legend might suggest.